the week: make singapore livable again
Singapore's total fertility rate drops below 1 for the first time; the PAP challenges the opposition to bring their stand on the reserves to the ballot box
Singapore’s total fertility rate (TFR) has dropped below 1 for the first time. Regardless what your position is on whether the world (or Singapore) is overpopulated, or whether you are personally anti-natalist, a TFR at or above replacement rate is necessary for a country’s survival. Not just in the sense that a growing population should in theory lead to growth and innovation which would benefit not just us in the now but humankind in the future, but also that if you think there is something about Singapore worth preserving, or that there is something that makes us Singaporean that is worth continuing as a country, then you should agree that a healthy TFR is necessary for our survival.
House Leader Indranee Rajah addressed the issue in the 28th February sitting of Parliament. She cites a variety of reasons for the low TFR, including 1) marriage plans interrupted by COVID-19; 2) financial costs of raising a child; 3) pressures to be an excellent parent; and 4) changing individual priorities and societal norms that reflect a global phenomenon. Of course the PAP is never at fault for any of them, so much so to deflect Leader Indranee circulates an annex of articles in Parliament just to highlight that falling birth rates are a global phenomenon, not just something that Singapore is dealing with. Never mind the policies of the PAP that have contributed to this low TFR: the stop at two policy, the shift to the Build to Order (BTO) system in 1997 instead of building HDBs ahead of demand, the ever shrinking flat sizes, an extremely pro employer legal regime that has led to the most fatigued and overworked people in the world.
I will concede that falling TFR is a problem the world over in developed countries. There is a shift in priorities from the traditional to the individual: increasingly people value fulfilling personal goals and aims instead of viewing themselves as a cog in the bigger machine of humankind. This is not a moral judgment on people’s priorities, merely an observation. I’m not here to decide what is better or worse for the individual, but it is clear that it has an impact on the TFR. People are getting married later, and women are postponing childbearing to further their careers and education. Leader Indranee is right on this count of course, that the focus on self-fulfillment and personal freedom is leading to an increasingly lower TFR. There is a strong correlation in the adherence to the traditional and a higher TFR, in fact the only country among the developed nations which is firmly above replacement is Israel, with a TFR of 2.9, with their highly religious society and large focus on traditional values. In Singapore this is also true, of the 3 major races, Malays have the highest TFR (Chinese 0.87, Malays 1.83, Indians 1.01 in 2022). Most Malays in Singapore are practicing Muslims and are the most religiously conservative group in Singapore.
Just to be clear, I am not saying that Singaporeans should become more religious, nor am I pushing institutionalized religion onto Singaporeans. This is not a debate about whether religion is good or bad. The point is that the single greatest predictor if someone will have children is whether they are religious or not. But what can be done about it? There needs to be a replacement of religious values and a replacement of the communal bonds which undergirds a religious community. I’m not sure that the government can stand in as a replacement for religious institutions, in fact I’d rather they didn’t.1 I’m not a fan of big government, and I’d rather not they entrench themselves in a way that the people can no longer live without the help or handouts of the government.
But I’m not even sure that the shift values are as applicable in Singapore: in a recent Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) survey almost 70% of Singaporeans polled wanted to get married and wanted to have children. If those numbers are true, then the shift in mindset in Singapore might have been overexaggerated. Of course, if most of them only want to have one child, the dropping TFR would still be a concern. But instead of focusing on stopping the shift in values, or trying to create some kind of social zeitgeist which would make childbearing desirable, the government should focus on changing the things they can.
So what is the PAP proposing to improve our TFR? Do they have any novel or impressive new solutions to a problem that has plagued Singapore since the 1980s? Not so. The usual slew of solutions were trotted out: an increase to the baby bonus scheme; a long overdue move to increase paternity care2; increased funding for preschool and education for children. Will any of these solutions work? I’m firmly convinced that throwing money at the problem will not solve it. The baby bonus scheme has been in place since 2001, and there has not been an increase in TFR, rather a steady decrease in our TFR. As an aside, I welcome any financial aid the government can provide in raising a child. After all, it is incredibly expensive to have one. But if the policy objective is to increase the TFR, then it has already been shown that increasing the baby bonus would not do it. In fact, a 2019 study by the United Nations has suggested that financial incentives do not encourage people to have more children. But the PAP is creatively bankrupt. They do not know how to raise the TFR, nor are they willing to try any new and novel policies to raise the TFR.
Leader Indranee asks for more time for the policies to take effect. How much longer must or can Singaporeans wait? The PAP has been working on the issue since 1987, and still our TFR is declining. In fact, if it were such an existential issue, why is the TFR not one of the criteria for the national bonus? If the TFR were so important, shouldn’t it be one of the ways we judge a successful government? Of course it is not one of the criteria because the PAP knows that they would never get that portion of the bonus should it become part of the criterion. They have no idea how to raise the TFR but will not admit it. They are not serious about raising the TFR, as long as they can pay lip service to it instead of having to put their money where their mouth is they would happily continue ignoring the issue. How well a country is doing is in part a function of who actually wants to live in it, have children in it, and raise a family in it. The failure of the PAP to raise the TFR is testament to the failure of their government policies.3
I think that the solution to this is to make Singapore a place where people want to live in. There are policies which the government can enact which will help with this:
Increase the size of HDBs while decreasing the costs.45 The HDB has decreased in size since the 1980s, and there seems to be no desire on the part of the government to reverse that. The common refrain from the government is that given that families are smaller today and therefore the size of the HDB has shrunk as well. But the inverse is true as well, if the house sizes are smaller, people are dis-incentivized from having larger families. Having larger HDBs will at least allow Singaporeans the option of having more children should they wish. Further, decreasing the cost of housing allays some of the financial burden and cost of living concerns young parents will have. It will also allow more Singaporeans to start in a bigger house, providing them with the ease of mind to plan for a larger family from the beginning without having to worry about moving to a bigger house to accommodate more children. Moving houses is a pain, and most people would avoid it if they could.
Further to this, switch back to building ahead of demand instead of continuing with the BTO system. This would cut down the waiting time for couples significantly, and allow couples to start on family planning right away. A wait time of 3 to as long as 7 years puts severe impediments on couples who want to start families, and contradicts the PAP’s rhetoric that they want Singaporeans to start families earlier instead of waiting. Building ahead of demand of course runs into the same issue that the old Registration for Flats system ran into: that there may be excess supply and the public may perceive this as a waste of resources. HDB can rent out the existing flats to singles under 35 who are not yet eligible to purchase their own flats. These singles can either form groups of friends to rent out a single flat, or apply as a single and be randomly allocated house mates. This allows young Singaporeans to foster independence away from home, and give singles a chance to mix with other singles which would allow for more dating opportunities which could lead to more marriages.
Build more communal spaces to allow for more social interaction to build a stronger social fabric. This would in the long run hopefully drive a sense of community and contribute to this “social compact” that Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong keeps alluding to. As religion plays a smaller and smaller role in secular Singapore, this would allow a fostering of communal bonds and hopefully make Singapore a place where people actually want to live in.
These are just a few examples off the top of my head which can help make Singapore a place people would want to live in, there are plenty of other policies and initiatives which can help: a shift in labour policy to make it more employee friendly instead of employer friendly; a more controlled immigration policy; a real effort to actually bring down cost of living and real wages up instead of increasing taxes and then using the revenue to fund programs to ease people’s cost of living ala GST and CDC vouchers; and the list goes on. But the PAP in their infinite wisdom will continue upping the baby bonus year after year, because that worked so well the year before, and the one before that, and the one before that, all the way back to 2001.
In one of the weirder call outs in Parliament, DPM Wong in his budget round up speech issued a challenge to the Opposition calling on them to “take up the challenge the Prime Minister issued in this House a few weeks ago: Make drawing more from the reserves an election issue. Go to the people, ask them for a mandate to change the Constitution, compel the President to let you spend 60%, 75% or even 100% of the NIR. The PAP will join issue with you – we will present our case to Singaporeans, and ultimately Singaporeans can decide what is the best fiscal approach to take Singapore forward.” This was him echoing PM Lee’s speech which I’ve written about before: I called out the PM and the PAP for being disingenuous.
Of course DPM Wong chooses to use the budget speech to grandstand and issue political challenges to the opposition instead of just laying out the aims of the budget. This is the man whose own party member Christopher de Souza attempted to call out Associate Professor Jamus Lim for supposedly making a political point, and in the same debate decides to make his own political point. He’s back at it again in the budget speech - Political Grandstanding 2, This Time It’s Personal. If the irony is lost on the PAP, no doubt because having gone through the Singapore education system they might have missed a literature lesson or two, it is certainly not lost on me.
The challenge is of course a pointless one. With a perfectly asymmetric access to information, the Opposition can never hope to win a debate about the reserves. How can you argue about something which you have no knowledge of? It seems to me that the members of the Opposition cannot help themselves but continue to step on rakes. Stop talking about spending from the reserves, or increasing spending from the NIR. According to an IPS survey, the public already has a low opinion of the Opposition when it comes to who they trust with the reserves. Out of 9 possible options, the Opposition comes in at 7th on the list, hardly a sterling endorsement by the public. In a continuation of rake stepping behaviour, it was the Leader of the Opposition Pritam Singh who brought up the survey, to what political gain I do not know. It is political malpractice to continue bringing up the reserves, or to be perceived to want to spend more of the reserves. Singaporeans really dislike the idea of spending the reserves.6
The only option for Opposition, and this is my position as well, is to outflank the PAP on fiscal conservatism. Instead of talking about drawing or spending from the reserves or NIR, the focus should be on spending less money in government, and cutting waste. The ideal position would be to fight back against any kind of GST tax increase while finding ways to save money in the budget (an easy place to start would be the CDC and the various endowment and trust funds).
Elections are coming, and if the Opposition want to be serious contenders they need to get out of their own way, and shift the spotlight to the PAP and make it a referendum on their policies and mistakes.
This is the premise of the “Life of Linda” comic released by the Biden Whitehouse. In it a single mother is raising her child is only able to make a better life for herself by the grace of government. The government had replaced all social and communal support, and is now the only crutch anyone can rely on. I’m not saying that I’m against all social handouts or welfare programs, I think that the government has a part to play in addressing issues of widening social and income inequality. But in the Singapore context becoming beholden to GST and CDC vouchers to allay the ever increasing cost of living driven in part by the increased GST taxes seems like an untenable position.
As usual, this is championed by PAP MP Louis Ng, who remains one of the better PAP MPs. The government has yet to announce a date which would put this into law, insisting that it would give time for companies to adjust, while in reality just giving companies an excuse not to kick the can down the road till it becomes inevitable for change.
The ever increasing migrant workforce and refusal to even consider basic things like English proficiency as part of accepting new citizens threatens our social compact. This is not to say that I am anti immigration, or that I am xenophobic. But there has to be something that undergirds us all, that makes us Singaporean. When someone wants to immigrate to Singapore, there has to be some kind of assimilation into Singapore society. Unless you believe that there is no core identity worth preserving, which I do not, then you have to have standards and criteria of cultural assimilation before accepting new immigrants.
The great lie is that HDB flats are priced according to market value. While it is true in the sense that HDB flats are priced according to the market value of comparable resale flats nearby, and therefore are priced according to market value, the government has full control of the supply of HDB flats. In 1997 when the financial crisis hit the government decided not to lower the prices of the empty flats despite the fact that there was an over supply of flats because units from the same block had already be sold at a higher price. Where any entity has full control of the price and the supply of a product, could it truly be said to be priced at market value?
I would also prefer a return to the capped prices of HDBs before Goh Chok Tong’s idea of the HDB flat being an asset. This would truly allow for prices to come down, instead of having to have it be sold at market value. A return to true public housing, which cannot be resold on the free market or rented out would allow for a greatly reduced price. The existing flats can be converted to truly private housing. There is much to discuss on revamping the currently untenable state in which public housing is supposedly an asset while also being affordable. The two positions are contradictory.
In the IPS study, majority of those polled did not want to increase NIR spending, even going as far as to support increasing taxes over increasing NIR spending. Most Singaporeans preferred the status quo of spending only 50% of the NIR. This is not surprising, when faced with a choice most people prefer the status quo.